The North West European Regional Development Fund team has issued a call for projects to access £6m to help small firms benefit from superfast broadband in Merseyside.

Earlier this year, Liverpool failed in its bid for government finance to help roll out superfast broadband. The EU has set a target of networks having 30 megabytes per second download speed by 2020.

Virgin and BT both offer between 80mbs and 100mbs in selected parts of Liverpool. However, certain commercial areas in Liverpool city region do not have sufficient broadband speed and it is these that the ERDF programme, along with local authorities, is looking to improve by offering technologies to link offices with the faster exchanges. The ERDF cash is available to pay for 50% of a project's costs.

The Merseyside authorities are also bidding for a share of the government's Broadband Delivery UK fund.